In France, Britain and America, public opinion had decided that despite the barrage of threats from Berlin, despite the fact that Czechoslovakia had ordered a partial mobilisation, despite the fact that Poland and Hungary were moving forces to the Czech frontier, anxious for territorial gains if the Germans should attack, there would be no war. It was as if the people of those countries had decided that collective willpower could dictate the course of history. It was a time of illusion, when the truth became whatever anyone chose to believe.
For Gruppenführer Bonner and his Gestapo colleagues in Prinz-Albrechtstrasse, the surrender to illusion became apparent when a major military parade through Berlin was met by sullen crowds who openly turned their backs on the sight of troops, tanks and towed artillery.
Hitler himself witnessed this rare public protest from his reviewing stand on Charlottenburger Chaussee. Crowds that had been bussed in to line the route melted into the trees and slipped away rather than greet the troops with the usual triumphant raised-arm salutes and cries of “Sieg Heil!”
To the Gestapo, this was disturbing evidence that the Führer had lost his popular appeal and, worse still, had aroused active hostility among his own supporters. Even the ever loyal Reinhard Heydrich was worried. He ordered teams of agents to sift through photographs and film of the crowds, trying to identify known subversives. There were none to be found, which was hardly a surprise, as Bonner pointed out, because all such troublemakers had long ago been locked up or liquidated.
“Are you telling me this was a spontaneous demonstration by ordinary people against war and against the Führer?” Heydrich demanded. He had called a meeting of his senior staff to review the apparent show of disloyalty.
“Those are your words, not mine,” said Bonner, allowing himself a smile.
Heads nodded in agreement around the table. It was not often Heydrich was wrong-footed in this way.
The next day, radio and press coverage reported huge crowds in Berlin applauding the troops and a beaming Hitler was pictured on the front pages returning their salutes with his own.
Macrae had actually watched the parade and seen Hitler frowning as the crowds refused to show any enthusiasm for the military and their hardware. Hitler had turned halfway through the march-past and begun a long, whispered conversation with Goebbels and Göring.
Macrae had observed the three men through field glasses from his balcony. As usual, Goebbels was doing the talking. Hitler, head bent, was listening and Göring impatiently looking around, waiting to give his own views. Macrae had put the field glasses down and tried to measure the distance. About five hundred and fifty yards, he estimated. He had killed men at greater range in the trenches.
He had picked up the glasses again and focused on the trees beyond the broad avenue. There in the darkness she had met him as arranged, punctual to the minute. He had given her the extension to her travel permit. It was valid until the week before Christmas. They had embraced without a word and held each other, listening to the murmur of the night wind in the old elm trees. They had made love with a passion he had never known before, he with his hand clamped over her mouth to stifle her cries, and she arching her back against the hard earth, thrusting upwards as if she wanted to lift herself from the ground and fly away. It was warm and it hadn’t rained for weeks. Afterwards, they had lain on a dry bedding of fallen leaves, their heads resting on their bundled clothes, and let their cigarettes glow briefly in the dark.
There would have been others in the park that night, couples seeking precious moments alone and, most dangerous of all, men committing the crime of loving their own sex, risking death in a fast fumbled grapple beneath the bushes. There would also have been listeners moving through the trees, waiting to switch on bright torches and snarl commands at their victims.
They had never discussed the risks, although they were far greater for her than for him. They had talked in whispered murmurs about the extension to her travel pass, about where they might meet when the autumn rains came. Then they had kissed for a long time, their sweat-cooled bodies clamped tightly together, before dressing and parting.
The humiliation of the British prime minister and his government unfolded throughout the month like a macramé paper cut-out that had been tightly folded and then released. For the rapidly diminishing number of those who felt that America might at last turn outwards from the policies of the New Deal and issue a stern warning to the Nazi regime, Franklin Roosevelt had a swift reply.
The American president was already planning a campaign for an unprecedented third term the following year. At a press conference, he stated that it was one hundred per cent certain that the US would not get involved in any hostilities in Europe. When questioned further, he would not even express a view on the behaviour of the Third Reich towards its citizens and neighbours.
In France, Édouard Daladier had repeatedly confided to anyone who would listen that France would not go to war for Czechoslovakia or for any other east European country Germany chose to annex. Goebbels’s obedient newspapers and his string of radio stations hailed these announcement as the voices of peace and waited for Britain to fall into line. Neville Chamberlain did so with an alacrity that astonished even Hitler and his confidants.
On 22 September, Chamberlain returned for a second meeting with Hitler, this time at Bad Godesberg on the Rhine. Once again, the Führer positioned himself at the top of steps at the front of the hotel, so that he could be photographed looking down on his visitor as they shook hands.
The British party also found that they had been given rooms on the opposite bank of the Rhine, far from the splendid hotel occupied by the Führer and his officials across the river. This meant they had to be ferried back and forth to meetings. The crude symbolism of these arrangements was hardly necessary. The whole world could see that the elderly Englishman with his wing collar, his watch chain and his waistcoat was about to be given a brutal lesson in power politics.
And so it proved. In the second of their two meetings, the Führer launched into a frenzied diatribe about the persecution of ethnic Germans in Czechoslovakia, renounced all previous agreements on the subject and told his startled visitor that the Sudetenland would fall to the German army by the end of the month, on September 30th – in exactly eight days’ time.
Chamberlain returned to London convinced he was dealing with a madman but clinging to the hope that a peace deal might be extracted from the wreckage if Czechoslovakia …
If Czechoslovakia – there was the rub. This was the heart of the issue that confronted the British cabinet and that was being examined carefully by the interested parties in Berlin, in Paris, in Moscow and above all in Prague. Was the sacrifice of Czechoslovakia, a nation of fifteen million people, the price that had to be paid for peace in Europe? And if the price was paid, would there be further demands?
Macrae had not been included in the British delegation at the talks on, or rather across, the Rhine. Protocol demanded his presence, since military matters were clearly on the agenda, yet he had not been surprised at his exclusion.
He and Sir Nevile Henderson had not spoken since their last encounter. He remained at the embassy, watching the cable traffic that connected the prime minister to his cabinet in London. The teleprinters clattered from dawn deep into the night, delivering reams of coded reports. Finally, it seemed the British government, if not the blissfully deluded public, were waking from the dream of peace and confronting the reality of war – a war for which the country was woefully ill-equipped.
The War Office in London had cabled Macrae for the latest news of Germany’s rearmament programme in light of the 1 October deadline. The reply was the same as it had been for several months: in armour, aircraft and artillery the German military were ahead of anything the British or French could put in the field. The crucial difference was manpower. The German conscription programme had given their generals a pool of several million trained men to draw on. Training programmes were accelerating. In only one area d
id Britain maintain superiority – naval power.
After the Bad Godesberg talks, the British cabinet agreed that the main battle fleet should leave its Scapa Flow base for manoeuvres in the North Sea. But the orders from Downing Street to the Admiralty were clear. The manoeuvres must not take the big ships within sight of the German coast.
Macrae felt himself a distant observer of these events, much as he had in the trenches with his sniper rifle. The powerful telescopic sights gave him a sense of detachment from the horrors around him. He could look over several hundred yards of cratered mud deep behind enemy lines and see men hurrying from trench to trench, bent double to escape a possible line of fire.
He had once trained his rifle on a man squatting to relieve himself in a shallow depression. The fellow was hunched up and seemed in pain as he defecated. Macrae had held him for a moment in his sights and then swung the rifle away, seeking a less obviously human target. He preferred to be disconnected from the inhumanity of war. The abstraction of a sniper’s role was such that a snap shot at a head bobbing up from a distant trench would seem more like target practice than killing a fellow man.
And that was how he felt now, disconnected, a spectator at a theatre of the absurd, wishing to leap onto the stage and warn the actors, but imprisoned in paralysis and unable to do so – a nightmare familiar to psychiatrists.
There were nights when his feet took him where he did not want to go. He would walk from the embassy past the Brandenburg Gate and through the Tiergarten. When he reached his own house just off the avenue he would walk on, telling himself he needed the exercise. When the park gave way to the suburb of Charlottenburg itself, he would keep on walking. There were art galleries whose windows were filled with the kind of wholesome art approved by Joseph Goebbels. There were cafés with amazing cakes and small taverns where a weary diplomat could take a glass of cool white wine without fear of interference. And there was also the Salon. Although he reached the door several times, he never went in.
Primrose continued her life with the other embassy wives on the usual round of dinners, cocktail parties and charitable work. She and Macrae met more often now for supper at home and occasionally for dinner at a neighbouring restaurant. They began to make love, although they did so not as lovers, nor even as a long-married couple who recognised the departure of passion, but rather as strangers seeking mutual solace stripped of emotion. Afterwards they would lie, breathing hard, sweating, saying nothing, not touching, two people bedded in different worlds.
They talked over drinks and meals in the desultory fashion of people whose thoughts were elsewhere. They discussed news from friends and family at home, embassy gossip and whatever entertainment happened to interest them in the city. They never talked of the prospect of war, because Primrose dismissed the idea as a fantasy dreamed up by journalists and politicians. Germany would take Czechoslovakia, expel the Jews and get back to making good cars and running an efficient railway system; that was her view and that would be the end of a middle European melodrama as far as she was concerned.
“And the Jews?” Macrae had asked. “Expelled, stateless, stripped of their homes and possessions after living here for centuries – is that what you want?”
“They can go to Palestine, can’t they? They want their own country, don’t they? Well, we should give them one – solve the problem for all time.”
They never talked of Koenig either. Primrose said she had not heard from him for weeks and Macrae believed her. He had also tried to contact Koenig without success. He had sent carefully worded anonymous notes to the staff headquarters stating the times of the morning service at the Berliner Dom on Sundays. But Koenig never turned up.
Macrae realised he was almost certainly with his unit on the endless manoeuvres being conducted along the eastern border. He also knew that, like his fellow officers, Koenig would be taking care to stay well away from Berlin and any contact with foreigners.
Roger Halliday had disappeared again too. Macrae had not seen his colleague since just before Chamberlain’s first meeting with Hitler. Even Daisy Wellesley, a reliable embassy gossip, had no idea where he had gone.
“Better not ask,” was her advice. “Those people do things a little differently from the rest of us.”
Sir Nevile Henderson had also been absent from the embassy for much of the month of September. He was shuttling back and forth between Berlin and London and now spent most of his time working from 10 Downing Street. Daisy Wellesley was twice summoned to London to work with him, but after the last occasion said only on her return, “They’re working on the next step,” she said. “God knows what that will be.”
Macrae had a good idea what that step would be. As the weather changed and the warmth of September gave way to the autumn rains in the last week of the month, the nations of Europe would prepare for the final act of delusion and deceit. He remembered a story he had heard from a fellow officer in the war. Flying over Normandy as a passenger in an open biplane, the man said he had looked down to see two cars moving fast on separate roads towards a junction. The high hedgerows prevented the drivers seeing each other, and their speed and distance from the crossroads made a collision almost certain. Powerless, he and the pilot had watched for almost a minute as the cars converged, until they collided and burst into flames.
He was gripped by the same feeling of impotence now. The army putsch against Hitler had been forestalled by the British peace diplomacy. Koenig and his conspirators had been denied the strong signal they needed to confront the Nazi regime.
The American military attaché, Percy Black, passed on reliable information that the Luftwaffe was testing a prototype jet engine-powered aircraft. In the naval dockyard at Hamburg, a 42,000-ton battleship named Bismarck was being constructed and would be launched the following year. The ship, and its sister the Tirpitz, also under construction on the north coast, would be both larger and more powerfully equipped than any vessel in the British fleet.
Macrae could do nothing as he watched a stream of cables revealing that Chamberlain planned a third meeting with Hitler, this time in Munich.
18
William Shirer was by temperament a cheerful optimist who delighted in the regular absurdities of life in the Third Reich. As a radio journalist, he worked hard to attract and hold the interest of an audience that stretched across America. The intellectual elite on the east coast and the wealthy upper class on the west coast were a natural audience for Shirer’s narrative of the lawless actions and limitless ambitions of the Nazi regime.
The difficulty that he and CBS faced was how to reach out to a truly national audience and get the struggling farmers and their hard-pressed wives in the Midwestern corn belt and the good old boys in the southern states to tune in to what was happening in Europe.
Descriptions of Hitler’s latest denunciation of the Czechs, the punitive treatment of the Jews and the slow-moving machinery of European diplomacy did not interest people struggling to avoid foreclosure and debt. The New Deal had been up and running for five years, but the misery of unemployment and the struggle for a livelihood in the Dust Bowl states remained unchanged for many people.
When Shirer invited Macrae to tea at the Hotel Adlon, he gladly accepted. Shirer was always good company and usually very well informed. He had seemed excited on the phone, claiming to have information that would “really get them talking out there in the West and might even make you Brits sit up”.
Macrae had been spending a lot of time at the hotel, finding refuge in the calm of the bar, where the unchanging nature of the staff, the guests, the cocktails, the potted plants and the floral display seemed a bulwark against the world outside. Even the Gestapo informant shaking cocktails at the bar had become an essential feature of this orderly universe. Macrae had never taken tea in the bar, nor had he seen any journalist do so. The sight of the famous American correspondent presiding over a table laid with a large teapot, patterned china cups on saucers and a collection of cakes on small plates was a
surprise.
“I have news for you,” said Shirer, beckoning him to a seat. “Sit down, sit down.”
It was four o’clock in the afternoon and the bar was empty except for a lunch party of German businessmen who were drinking their way towards the cocktail hour. Shirer poured the tea, handed a cup to Macrae and offered him a small cake.
His face was flushed and there was a sheen of sweat on his bald pate. He seemed animated and Macrae wondered whether he had been drinking. He pushed the thought away. Shirer took his job very seriously and he obviously had something to say.
“No thanks,” said Macrae. “I’m not a cake person. A toasted scone with jam is about as close as I get.”
“Is that a Brit joke?” said Shirer, suspicious that his guest was making fun of him.
“No. I don’t have a sweet tooth.”
Shirer sat back suddenly, smiling. “You just said it!”
“What?”
“‘Sweet tooth’. That’s my story – that’s what is going to get them talking all over America.”
“Really?” Macrae smiled and sipped his tea. Maybe Shirer had been drinking.
“Yeah, and you British might do something with this story, so listen up.”
Shirer had been covering the recent rounds of talks between Chamberlain and Hitler in Berchtesgaden and then on the Rhine at Bad Godesberg. But it was during the first session in Hitler’s mountain retreat in the Bavarian Alps that he had come across a story that threw new light on the Nazi leader, or so he said.
As the talks had dragged on from morning into late afternoon, Shirer had grown weary of waiting for a meaningless communiqué and had gone for a walk in the town. While taking coffee in a patisserie, he had heard a young woman at the counter talking about an order for a special cake and chocolate biscuits. She was due to pick up the order but said she would wait because she wanted a change in the topping of the cake. It was an apple cake but she had said it needed more nuts and raisins strewn across the cream on top, and the cream had to be thicker.
Midnight in Berlin Page 26